Sunday, July 5, 2015

Historical quote of the day

“Nothing like the battle of Omdurman will ever be seen again. It was the last link in the long chain of those spectacular conflicts whose vivid and majestic splendour has done so much to invest war with glamour.

…This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills. It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed…. To the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game.”

- Winston Churchill, My Early Life: 1874-1904, quoted in Sven Lindqvist,‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1992), pp. 53-54